Sub-Region Localized Hashing for Fine-Grained Image Retrieval.

Fine-grained image hashing is challenging due to the difficulties of capturing discriminative local information to generate hash codes. On the one hand, existing methods usually extract local features with the dense attention mechanism by focusing on dense local regions, which cannot contain diverse local information for fine-grained hashing. On the other hand, hash codes of the same class suffer from large intra-class variation of fine-grained images. To address the above problems, this work proposes a novel sub-Region Localized Hashing (sRLH) to learn intra-class compact and inter-class separable hash codes that also contain diverse subtle local information for efficient fine-grained image retrieval. Specifically, to localize diverse local regions, a sub-region localization module is developed to learn discriminative local features by locating the peaks of non-overlap sub-regions in the feature map. Different from localizing dense local regions, these peaks can guide the sub-region localization module to capture multifarious local discriminative information by paying close attention to dispersive local regions. To mitigate intra-class variations, hash codes of the same class are enforced to approach one common binary center. Meanwhile, the gram-schmidt orthogonalization is performed on the binary centers to make the hash codes inter-class separable. Extensive experimental results on four widely used fine-grained image retrieval datasets demonstrate the superiority of sRLH to several state-of-the-art methods. The source code of sRLH will be released at https://github.com/ZhangYajie-NJUST/sRLH.git.